


A Curative for the Heart

by wordsmithraven



Series: Samwena Week April 2020 [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt Rowena MacLeod, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Sam Winchester, Romance, Witch Sam Winchester, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-02-23 06:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23540617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsmithraven/pseuds/wordsmithraven
Summary: Rowena gets dosed with a magic draining poison. Sam has his hands full taking care of her.Samwena Fan Week 2020 - Day 2: Hurt/Comfort
Relationships: Rowena MacLeod/Sam Winchester
Series: Samwena Week April 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693411
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21
Collections: Samwena Week





	A Curative for the Heart

The heavy iron door to the Bunker slammed against the wall with the force of Samuel's kick. Rowena felt her bones rattle with it too. Or maybe that was the shakes from whatever she’d been cursed or dosed with. It was starting to get hard to concentrate and she gave up on trying to figure out the difference. 

Samuel swept down the stairs with her in his arms, his feet slamming hard into the metal with each step. Rowena almost wished she'd been wearing her white Siriano dress instead of a smart pantsuit just so the skirt would flare out dramatically when he turned a corner into a hallway. It was quite the chivalrous moment. One Rowena hadn’t experienced as often as she would’ve liked in her 400 years of life. Such a shame that she started to pass out before she could appreciate it.

***

Avina Davenport, the pale sow, had invited Rowena and a few others to a conclave to discuss the territorial rights to Magda the Mad’s notorious storeroom. Magda had gone and bewitched herself into a parakeet during one of her ill-advised experiments. And honestly, a mistake like that among their sort automatically meant your magical vault and all its assorted treasures were up for grabs to anyone who could take it.

Still, there were niceties to be upheld. There’d been some dispute as to whether her magical accoutrements belonged first to her former coven members as she’d stolen quite a few items before dissolving the coven without notice. Rowena had only been there to mediate the meeting as she wasn’t overly interested in Magda’s spells. The witch had truly earned the title “mad.” Her spells were legendarily unstable and lethal. Rowena had preferred to wait until someone younger and more foolish tried snatching them to see if any were worth it rather than risk her own neck on Magda’s insidious enchantments. Resurrections were far too time consuming to waste on breaching some witch’s vault.

Avina had decided to get a leg up on everyone by calling everyone involved to a conclave and killing the lot. She had used some hex or elixir that was clearly meant to drain them of life and magic within a few minutes. There were a number of potions, amulets, and spells that could’ve done something similar. It was hard to tell which one Avina used. Most likely it also would’ve transferred the power to Avina, which narrowed it down some but not enough to immediately diagnose a counter-curse or antidote. 

Rowena would’ve found it clever if Avina had gotten away with it. She wasn’t a stranger to stabs in the back, after all. It was too bad that Rowena was always prepared for just such an occasion. She never left home without a Resurrection Sachet sewn into her person. After Avina left them all to die on the floor, the spell had gone into effect once it sensed her life force draining too fast and too far. It was fighting tooth and nail to keep her alive, giving her just enough time to call her latest almost-pupil.

“Hello.” Samuel’s voice was rough with sleep. Considering it was early brunch, he must’ve been out on a hunt and treating himself to a late morning.

“Hello, Samuel,” she replied shakily. She’d lost the feeling in her hands and was desperate not to drop the cell phone.

“Rowena?” The boy sounded like a lost lamb, bless him.

“Would it be too much trouble if you swung by the Ambassador on Grand, Central Lawrence? I could use some assistance.”

Perhaps casual wasn’t the way to play this but Rowena had to keep up appearances. She despised even the thought of sounding desperate. 

Her teeth were chattering so hard they were near to cracking. Rowena laid back onto the floor where she’d fallen and tried to steady her head. Her fellow witches were scattered around her in various states of dying or dead. Rowena had to thank the Goddess that there seemed to be no projecting of bodily fluids involved with what was happening to them or she’d be rolling around in the worst muck. Incidentally, that also narrowed down the list further.

“Rowena, can it wait until later today? I just laid down to go to sleep.”

Ellicott, another witch dying with her, twitched his foot violently into hers during his death throes. 

“No, Samuel," she said a little more urgently, "it cannot. If you don’t get here soon, I’m afraid I’ll be _dead_.”

And that was the end of that conversation as she started to pass out for the first time that day. 

_Another clue_ , she thought absently before everything in her vision turned black.

***

“Rowena? Rowena!”

She came to lying in the back of a car being jostled about like a ball at a playground. The car smelled stale like someone had worn wet socks in it. Rowena wiped a hand on her forehead and came away with a glistening hand. Perhaps the smell was due to her own flop sweat. Rowena grunted in disgust. So undignified.

Late morning light streamed through a window directly into her eyes. She tried to sit up properly but was too weak to finish the movement. She resigned to just suffer through the glare until the car drove somewhere darker. She focused her eyes within the car and found that her position allowed her to see the back of Samuel’s long, tousled head. 

“Rowena,” he repeated. “We’re almost there.” 

He spun the steering wheel around a turn and reached back to take her wrist, checking her heart rate. His massive paw was hot and calloused; she hissed at the unexpected touch. She could’ve told him that her heart was racing. The pounding in her ears told her as much.

“What the hell happened, Rowena?”

She forced out through gritted teeth, “Poisoned.”

Just before she’d passed out the first time, she’d narrowed down her symptoms to some kind of poison or potion. The sweats she was experiencing confirmed that much. Now they just needed to figure out which one and get Samuel to create an antidote.

“Poisoned? Do you know what with?”

“N- no. Draining my magic. Tastes like aniseed. Fingers are numb.”

“I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry,” he said, unmistakably worried himself.

Samuel’s hand tightened on her wrist and then slid down to grasp her fingers. It was a sweet gesture clearly meant to comfort her, but her numb digits meant she couldn’t feel a thing.

The car turned up a road and she heard gravel crunch underneath the wheels. They pulled to a stop and Samuel leapt from the car, car keys still in the ignition. Rowena heard the door behind her head unlock and felt it start to open. She grabbed a hold of the front seat to pull herself up until she felt Samuel’s hand on her back. He pulled her out of the car and into his arms in one move. They were moving away from the car before Rowena could blink.

By the time they made it through what she vacantly realized was the Bunker door, she was dizzy again and she knew another fainting spell was coming on soon. 

A pulsing pain crept up from her side where she’d buried her resurrection seal this time. She grabbed at Samuel’s collar and hissed, “ _Sachet_.”

She was trying to give him as much information as she possibly could, entrusting that it would help him help her. Based on the rapid decline in her power, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to function for much longer. Annoyingly, she could only hope that the time he sometimes spent dabbling in the mystic arts with her was enough to save her life.

She bumped her head into his shoulder as he raced down the stairs. The clack of a door shutting was the last thing she heard before her next faint.

***

“Rowena, come on. Sit up.”

She heard his voice through a haze. She felt herself being lifted but she was too tired to open her eyes and see who it was. Something cold and metallic was pressed to her lips and an even colder liquid poured into her mouth. It was as bitter as licorice and she gagged at the taste. 

“You have to drink it all or it won’t work.” 

Samuel. He was helping her. A warm hand held her face as the cup returned to her mouth. She followed his instructions this time. When the liquid came pouring over the rim, she ignored her first instinct to throw it up and instead began to swallow. It took four big gulps to finish and once she did, the potion began to work.

It started at her sternum. A cold wave rolled through her veins from her chest out to her fingertips and down to her toes. Rowena tensed and fell back into what she only just realized were pillows on a bed. She didn’t have time to appreciate the softness, however, since the chill her veins began to get colder. It felt like she’d been thrown into the arctic ocean. It was so cold that her body stopped shivering altogether.

She stayed suspended in that state for a number of minutes and then without warning she convulsed on the bed. Her eyes snapped open and she wheezed out an exhale. A wisp of smoke the color of burnt sienna was released from her lungs and into the air. It hung above her for a few seconds then evaporated.

The moment the smoke disappeared, Rowena began to regain her senses. Her eyes cleared, her temperature normalized, and the feeling returned to her hands. She was still weak, however, so she didn’t have the ability to sit up like she wanted to. Instead, she simply turned her head to take in the man standing next to her.

“Holy shit,” Samuel exclaimed, eyes wide.

He wore his customary plaid flannel with jeans but his hair was disheveled and his face sported uneven stubble. He looked as haggard as Rowena felt with bags under his eyes and a pale, clammy complexion.

“I can’t believe that worked,” he continued. 

“I'm sorry but did you just say that you ‘ _can’t believe that worked_ ’?” she asked incredulously. Her voice was scratchy and thinner than usual.

“Yeah, well...I had to do a little experimenting since we didn’t have any adarna talons. I had to substitute it with caladrius feather and hope for the best.”

Rowena inhaled so sharply that she started coughing.

Samuel hurriedly sat the chalice on the nightstand. The dull clunk of the metal hitting the wood was louder than Rowena was expecting and she jumped a little. He sat down next to her on the bed and placed his great big hand over her forehead. She could tell her skin was still damp with sweat and she was still shaking, though not as violently as before.

“You _improvised_ my healing potion?!” she screeched, still hung up on that. She could feel her eyes starting to bulge so she slammed her lids down tight to regain control of her own face. She took a few deep breaths through her nose until she calmed down.

When she reopened her eyes, she saw Samuel ringing out a wet washcloth and moving to dab it on her forehead. The cloth was warm and smelled like fresh peppermint. She reached up to take the cloth and do it herself but Samuel firmly grabbed her hand and pressed it down on the bed while the other hand continued to wipe at her face. The move forced his chest to lean over hers, closing her into the shadow if his body. She growled in protest but he just ignored her.

“It was either work with what I had here in the Bunker or let you die. Which would you have preferred?” 

“I would have _preferred_ if you’d asked me first,” she complained.

Samuel gave her a look of exasperation. “By the time we got back, you were completely out of it. You wouldn’t have been able to even talk if I _had_ found a way to wake you up.”

Rowena harrumphed and stopped trying to lift her arm. Samuel’s hand stayed on hers, however, and slid down to her wrist to check her pulse. 

She knew he was right. She knew she was being unreasonable. She couldn’t help it, though. She hated feeling weak most of all. Lying there trussed up like a chicken in blankets with far lower than her usual thread count, reliant on a hunter of all people to nurse her back to health. Meanwhile, the witch who cursed her ran free and she was powerless to get revenge. 

And she _was_ powerless. In every sense of the word. It wasn’t just being too physically weak to move, Rowena could feel that nearly all of her personal store of magic was gone from her body. Stolen and probably being used to fluff up some vanity spell by Avina. Her resurrection seal was used up as well and when she tried to reach out for the local ley-line that ran beneath and powered the Men of Letters’ Bunker, she gave herself a dull headache.

 _Great. Just fantastic,_ she thought and pressed her lips together. She reached up to rub at her own temples, the headache starting to get worse.

It was a nightmare.

Samuel leaned even more over her at her movement. His great, big hazel eyes stared down into hers with his sad, hangdog expression.

“Is your head hurting?” he asked, voice sympathetic. “That’s not one of the usual side effects but maybe I got the measurements wrong.”

She waved off his concern. “No, Samuel, the headache isn’t from your elixir, it’s from tapping a ley-line. You did fine.”

The crooked smile that broke across his face was impossibly comely. Rowena was embarrassed by how much she found it appealing. Her face heated up and she thanked all the gods in her pantheon that she could reasonably blame it on the illness. She didn’t have nearly enough time to examine _that_ new facet to her relationship with the youngest Winchester, so she gracefully decided to just ignore it and move the conversation back to the matter at hand.

“So adarna talons, then?” she said, mind racing through her mental catalog of potions with that ingredient. “If the original recipe called for adarna talons, then Avina must’ve dosed me with--”

“ _Nostrum Empousai_ ,” they said in unison.

A truly nasty potion. Difficult to make and even more expensive. It required brass shavings from an empusa leg and tarasque tail venom just to get started. Empousai were extremely rare, nearly extinct. Tarasque venom was almost as hard to come by. Rowena chuckled. At least Avina had chosen a premium poison for them. It was no wonder the Resurrection Sachet had run into such trouble counteracting it. She was lucky it had preserved her as long as it had. 

_Luck_ , she thought, looking over to Samuel pouring water into a tall glass. _And the quick thinking of a part-time witch._

He really had done well. Caladrius feather as a substitute for adarna talons? That was truly sublime magical intuition. He was really coming along in his ability if he came up with that kind of fix within a half hour of diagnosing the illness and finding such an ingredient lack. She’d never had a protégé be able to do anything like that. 

Sam soaked up magical knowledge like a sponge. Rowena knew that he’d had some kind of affinity for the dark arts when he was a young man but had left it behind him since it was so deeply entwined with demons. Rowena had long suspected that his prior demonic power masked other, more natural ability. She feared, however, that if she brought it up, he would reject it. Nothing hurt a witch’s power more than that.

Rowena decided to ruminate on it longer before seriously offering an apprenticeship to him. Samuel seemed a long way away from truly embracing the idea of being a witch, even part-time. She didn’t want to scare him off. At the very most, it was certainly time to formally fold him into her personal wards.

“Very nice,” she said instead and left the rest for another day.

“Thank you,” he replied and handed her the glass of chilled water. 

She had trouble holding it and sitting up at the same time. So he helped her up, slid behind her, and assisted her in drinking. She was more parched than a Vegas gambler stranded in the desert. She gulped down the entire glass in minutes. When she finished, Samuel leaned her carefully back onto fluffed up pillows, arranging her so that she could stay sitting up against the headboard.

“It was a good thing Charlie and I had started to digitally catalog the Bunker research. It would’ve taken me so much longer to find out about _Nostrum Empousai_ if we hadn’t.” He began cleaning up the nightstand as he spoke, filling a tray with sweat-soaked rags and the empty chalice for the curative. 

“Dean didn’t see the point but I _told_ him it would come in handy one day. Charlie agreed, of course--”

She took the moment while he chattered on to finally view the room she was in. Obviously it was one of the Bunker bedrooms: red brick walls, tragically low lighting, and worn wood finishes. The particular room Rowena was in was sparsely decorated. Only the bare minimum in furnishings and no wall hangings whatsoever. She almost thought it was a guest room until she spotted the overflow of occult books on the far desk and the open trunk of weapons next to that. It was then that she noticed the strong woodsy scent wafting from the pillows behind her. Samuel’s scent. His scent...in his room.

“--but I still had to go digging since we didn’t have all of the ingredients for the proper cure--which also took forever to find, by the way. Sorry it took me so long.”

“It’s alright,” she murmured absently, fingers rubbing curiously at the soft cotton sheets. His sheets...in his bed, which was in his room.

There was a clatter of dishes and Rowena’s attention swung back to Samuel. He’d completely cleaned the nightstand while she’d zoned out and he’d left the tray on the floor next to the door. He walked back over to her bedside and sat down again on the edge of the bed. Rowena’s eyes darted over to the completely empty and accessible chair in front of the desk but she didn’t say anything. She was not willing to touch any of that with a ten-foot pole.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked, taking her pulse again and measuring its speed against the massive watch on his wrist. His fingers were calloused and a little rough on her skin.

“I’m feeling right as rain,” she lied a little breathlessly. She _was_ feeling better in the sense that less than an hour earlier she’d been palpitating her life away on the floor of a five-star hotel. Comparatively, she was doing splendidly. Truth be told, she still wasn’t really able to move around. If Samuel asked her to stand up, she had the faintest suspicion that she would fall directly onto her face.

Samuel gave her a chastising look. “Rowena...”

She scoffed and shook off the hand he tried to place on her forehead again. “Well, don’t go asking me to dance a gig,” she muttered irritably.

No one had ever accused her of being a gracious patient.

He sighed but stopped his attempts to coddle her. Noticeably, he did not stand up from the bed.

“I just want to make sure everything worked alright. I wouldn’t want to accidentally kill you while trying to save your life.”

“As opposed to on purpose later?” she quipped and smiled.

A cold silence fell between them and Samuel stilled. Rowena looked up to find his face crumpling into guilt and self-doubt. When she caught his eyes, he quickly looked toward the brick wall behind her head. She grimaced and reached out to touch his forearm. Before she could make contact, he withdrew and jerked to his feet. 

“I- ah, I’ll just take these and bring back some food.” He hurriedly made his way out the door stopping only to pick up the tray he’d piled high with dirty rags.

Rowena let out a long, regretful sigh. Not the response she’d been aiming for. She pinched tightly at the bridge of her nose. Her headache was returning. 

Rowena had long since made a kind of peace with the Sword of Damocles hanging over her head after she’d learned about Death’s prophecy. Prophecy was something she not only believed was real but she also trusted in it. For her, the world was a mass of chaotic nonsense but prophecy and magic bound it all together. It kept things orderly and in control. When she tapped into that magic, she could control it too.

Learning about her fate had been a sort of relief for her. An assurance that her life was headed toward greatness. The fact that she was one of the few if not the only people in all of Creation to have the same manner of death in every single permutation was pure destiny. And destiny could never be a source of fear for her.

It seemed to be the opposite for Samuel. Sometimes it was hard to read him. Hard to get into his mind and know how he’d react. He aped at being a simple man but, in all her long centuries, he was one of the most complex people she’d ever met. It was what had made him such a formidable foe back when she’d been his enemy and he’d been hers.

Rowena smiled ruefully. It was ironic that they’d shared a deeper enmity _before_ she’d learned he was destined to kill her. Now that the truth had been revealed, instead of giving her the incentive to try to kill him first or convincing him to hunt her, it just made sadness sit heavy in the air between them.

And she _was_ sad as well. She may have found peace with the idea of their predestination but she did have regrets. Regret that she’d probably die having spent so many decades searching the world for something that couldn’t fulfill her, only to find a better path so late. Regret, of course, over the deplorable way she'd treated her boy Fergus and the fact that she'd never get to tell him as much. Regret that she likely wouldn’t live long enough to see Samuel become the witch she knew he could be. Regret that they’d wasted those first few years hating each other when they could’ve been something altogether _else_ to each other. 

There was nothing Rowena could do to help him, to help either of them. What ailed Samuel was something etched in stone. The very universe was against him. It was a shame that there wasn’t a curative for the heart as well as the body. 

It was a long time before Samuel came back and she almost dozed off. She smelt his return before she heard it and when she opened her eyes, she saw him carrying a new tray weighed down with food.

“Here we go,” he said as he pushed aside the empty water glass and sat the tray down on the nightstand. 

There was no trace of his prior mood in his tone so Rowena made the decision to ignore their earlier hiccup. She suspected they would really have to have a discussion about it soon but her growling stomach dissuaded her from having it then. Her last meal had been an hour before and it had been poisoned. Any energy she’d gained from the brunch from hell had been burned up during the fight for her life. She was starving.

There was some kind of soup with a plate of steamed spinach and carrots to the side. There was also a small bowl of blueberries and a cup of black tea as well. A small carafe of milk was also provided. Just the way she liked it.

“What kind of soup is this?” she asked, eyeing the bowl. The soup was a pale beige and she could see some kind of bean and herbs in it. 

“White bean and salmon,” Samuel answered. “You need to replenish your energy.” He laid a small towel over her lap and began to pick up the spoon, presumably to _feed_ her.

She reached out to take the utensil. “I can do it myself,” she grumbled. 

She had to admit the small tremor in her hand wasn’t very convincing. Samuel seemed to agree since he very gently took the same hand and pressed it down to her side. She glared at him for the imposition.

“If you don’t let me help, it’s going to spill.”

She then began to contemplate what would be more embarrassing: him feeding her or her trying it on her own and spilling down her front. The urgent rumble from stomach made the decision for her and she begrudgingly gave up her protests.

He fed her slowly and patiently with hands smelling of lemon soup. He was careful to blow on every spoonful so as to not burn her with the soup or the hot tea. It was an incredible meal. The soup wasn’t too thick or too fishy, the spinach steamed to perfection, the tea steeped for just the right length of time, and the blueberries were fresh and flavorful. The only thing missing was a _digestif_ but Rowena doubted he would give her liquor right then.

She polished off the last of the blueberries, Samuel’s fingers pressed to her lips. It was wholly unnecessary for him to feed her the fruits so intimately. They’d both just sort of fallen into it without thinking about it. She leaned back into the headboard after they were finished and he’d removed the small towel. She was completely sated. Curiously, she noticed that she was out of breath. Her heart was racing again, though not at the thoroughbred pace it had churned when she’d been dying. Samuel noticed her ragged inhales and misinterpreted the reason.

“You still seem to be affected by the _Nostrum Empousai._ Maybe you should stay here for the night.”

He stood and started to rearrange her body into a lying position, pulling the blankets in her lap up to her chin. Rowena couldn’t remember the last time someone had actually tucked her in to sleep. Certainly not once she’d passed her first century. Perhaps the last person to do it had been her mother before the woman had died when Rowena was five. 

It was so unexpected, in fact, that she almost missed what he’d just said.

“Wait,” she protested and struggled against his comforter. “Avina is still out there. She'll go to ground if we wait until tomorrow and then she’ll be untraceable for years.”

“She won’t get away,” Sam promised and glanced over to his desk and chest of weapons. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Rowena growled at the very thought of him taking her kill. “You are _not_ going to kill her, Samuel Winchester. She and all the magic she stole are mine.”

Samuel threw up his hands. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Rowena. I’ll just make sure we have a way to find her. A surveillance spell, maybe…”

Rowena found herself so pleased he had thought first of using a spell, that it immediately assuaged her brief anger.

He leaned over her and brushed her hair back from her face. 

“When we hunt her down,” he continued, darkly. “You will most definitely be there to finish her off.”

Rowena gave him a wicked smile before closing her eyes to sleep.


End file.
